Matt Cutts On How Quickly You Should Hear Back About Reconsideration Requests

Google’s Matt Cutts has posted a new Webmaster Help video talking about reconsideration requests – specifically, how long they should take. In the video, he responds to the following question:

I’ve been waiting for 2 months to hear back regarding a reconsideration request. Is this normal? There is no one I can contact about it.

He says that’s not normal, and that you could show up in the webmaster forum and ask what’s going on.

“What I would do is, I would actually do another reconsideration request, and I would mention, ‘Hey, I didn’t hear back. What’s going on here?'” he says.

“When you do a reconsideration request, you should get a sort of confirmation message pretty quickly that lets you know we got the reconsideration request,” says Cutts. “If you don’t see that, then maybe something went wrong in the submission – the form didn’t go through or something along those lines. Much faster than two months – the backlog can vary, so it can be a week, or it can be several days if we have a lot of people all doing reconsideration requests, maybe after we just started sending out a new type of message, for example.”

“You should hear back with one of roughly three different replies,” he continues. “The replies are basically: yes, we think you’re in good shape so your reconsideration request has been granted; it might be no, we think you still have some work to do, and so that’s the sort of thing where it’s like, okay, you need to keep improving the site; it can also, in some situations, be you don’t have any sort of manual issue at all, and you should hear back very quickly about that.”

“Sometimes, you flip the coin and you don’t land on heads – yes, or tails – no,” he says. “You sort of get the very side of the coin, and in that in case, you’ll get something that says we have processed your reconsideration request. Typically what that means is there might have been multiple issues. So maybe one issue is resolved, but there’s still another issue or we moved from something where we thought the entire domain was not as good to maybe we’re more granular. So that just mans, okay, there’s still some issues, but more of them have been resolved.”